


Revelations

by Tyellas



Series: Lab T-4 [16]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Bible Quotes, Blood, Body Horror, Drama, Gen, Sexual Content, Tension, Violence, against helpless household items, for resilient readers, movie ending, nasty brutish and short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-06
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2019-03-26 15:14:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13860399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: During a final moment inside Elisa’s apartment, Strickland realizeseverything.





	Revelations

**Author's Note:**

> From a prompt - what if Strickland, at the last possible minute, figured out the truth about Elisa and the creature? A great starting point for his final spiral into madness...

In the shattered doorway of Elisa's apartment, Strickland allows himself one look back. His stakeout had paid off. He'd tracked the creature and its true kidnapper, Elisa, down. They’d been here. They’d gone. He knows where they are going. It's a straight shot in his fast car to the docks. By dawn he’ll be the General’s golden boy again, his place in the universe assured. Strickland turns back, inspired. He needs one last thing, for that: to know why she’d done it. Why the mute, edgy cleaner had stolen his Asset.

Strickland goes inside. Music is leaking up from below. Elisa’s work as a cleaner, combined with this spinster's tenement room, should’ve been enough reason. Russians, bribes, Bolsheviks. But something nags at Strickland. He gives her room one last scan.

Christ, she’s a slut. The place is a humid mess, food abandoned on the table. She’d left in a hurry. A quote from his wife's Bible, its Book of Revelations, was satisfyingly right. -- _In one hour she had been brought to ruin. --_

From a heap of clothes by the bed, Strickland picks up a pair of Elisa’s panties, tossed aside. They’re as tiny as a girl’s, cheap aqua nylon and lace. They’re damp. Strickland grins. He starts to lift them to his face, making plans for when he has Elisa locked down, and stops.

Inside the crotch, loose fish-scales glisten.

Inside the crotch.

Strickland flings them aside and staggers back to the bathroom. There has to be something – there is, on the wood floor right outside. A pair of wet footprints from inhuman webbed monstrosities. The dainty imprint of a woman’s high heels shelters between them, intimately close.

The most obscene thing he’s ever imagined brands his brain.  

And the quotes are back, whispered in the back of his head: a scant silvery voice, as if Elisa was finally speaking to him, and him alone.

_\-- Why are you astonished? I will explain to you the mystery of the woman and of the beast she rides --_

Strickland’s mutilated hand burns, stings, as if the rest of him had turned into a pillar of salt when he looked back. He grips it to make the pain steady while he thinks. How had it started? The delicate, silent woman and the unreadable, repulsive creature?

_\-- The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and yet will come up out of the Abyss and go to its destruction --_

That thing must have raped her. Off its chain, alone with a female for the first time in months. She’d be powerless to stop it. Maybe she’d liked it, put herself in its way for more. Women did that, hanging around you, luring, tempting.

_\-- The punishment of the great prostitute, who sits by many waters. With her the kings of the earth committed adultery –-_

Maybe she’d made the move. To tame it a different way, give it a reason to follow orders. Or for what Strickland had thought he'd seen in Elisa’s watchful eyes, her mute and hopeless hunger. The need every woman had for a hard screw, whether they admitted it or not.

Either way, Strickland knows: that abomination had made her scream.

His vision goes red. “You bitch – you fucking – animals. Animals, the filthy pair of you –-”

Strickland howls. Shoves over the formica table, throws a chair at one of the shelves full of gimcracks. Tins and pasteboard and a greeting card go flying. But none of them, somehow, break when they land. Even the bookcase itself, cheap and light, simply falls over.

Maddened, he hurls himself out and down the stairs, two at a time. Blood is gushing along his left arm. There is no more time, and he knows, now. Knows why, and what has to come next.

_\-- Give back to her as she has given; pay her back double for what she has done. Pour her a double portion from her own cup --_

He doesn’t need to think any more. It’s all rage and instinct until he takes them down.

**Author's Note:**

> All quotes from the New Testament Bible, the Book of Revelations, 17 and 18.


End file.
